Around the world, businesses and governments daily contend with the need to verify the identity of their customers or other individuals. In part, this is due to the good business practice of knowing the identity of a customer before doing business with them. It also is a regulatory requirement in many jurisdictions. For example, most countries have regulations (often referred to as “know your customer” or “KYC” regulations) that impose due diligence requirements on financial institutions, government agencies and other regulated companies. The due diligence requirements ensure that these businesses and agencies require their customers to provide detailed identity information before providing certain financial services or other products or services to their customers. KYC requirements include due diligence requirements to prevent money laundering (referred to as “Anti Money Laundering” rules) and Combating Financing of Terrorism (CFT).
Other business environments also need similar verification requirements. For example, many businesses have a continuing need to verify bank and payment accounts that are used for either direct debit functionality for recurring payments (such as bill payments, insurance payments, etc.) and external account linking for funds transfer where micro deposit validation is a common practice but takes too much time because of the manual work involved.
Further, as electronic funds transfer (“EFT”) systems mature, they are implement “pull EFT/Direct Deposit” functionality that is aimed at allowing merchants to initiate a payment request directly from consumer bank accounts. This process does require a one—time mandate set up and validation, which could take a week or so, and involves significant logistical costs in manually sighting and validating consumer signature etc. There are also significant costs of archival and retrieval of said data. It would be desirable to reduce the time and cost required for such activities.
Similarly, external bank account linking, which is used for inter-bank funds transfer today uses a micro deposit validation into the external bank account that is manual and time consuming process. It would be desirable to improve this process.
To satisfy many of these KYC requirements, businesses may require that a consumer provide information to prove their identity. Such information may include, for example, a passport or other government-issued identification, one or more items proving their current address, and one or more items proving their date of birth or other information. For example, a consumer who wishes to open a bank account in Singapore may be required to present their passport, their Singapore National ID number, and a copy of one or more items proving their current address. This information is provided to an authorized employee of the bank at which the customer wishes to open an account and the employee enters the information into the banks KYC systems.
If the customer also wishes to purchase a mobile telephone and/or obtain a new SIM card for a mobile telephone, he is again required to provide the same information proving his identity and address. This can become inconvenient and cumbersome for consumers. Further, each merchant, business or other entity that needs to verify the identity of their consumers incurs substantial cost and effort in performing the verification as often such customer identification and verification procedures are manual in nature.
It would be desirable to provide systems and methods that facilitate authenticating a user based on his/her identity and address.